CHAPTER XXIV.
It was so arranged then; and though Elizabeth was rather disappointed to hear that she was not to see her tidy house at Tonsberg again, she allowed no indication of the feeling to escape her, and Salvé went by himself to arrange their affairs there.
When he had sold what property they had, and bought his pilot-boat, they had still a small sum left with which to begin housekeeping afresh, and Merdö was chosen for their future residence.
From the outside this island looks only like one of the desolate series which form the outworks of the coast for miles here in either direction, with many a spot of angry white marking the sunken rocks between. But the inner side forms the well-known Merdö harbour of refuge, with its little hamlet of fishermen's and pilots' houses on the strand; and it was in one of these, a little red painted house with a small porch in front and a flagged yard and garden behind, and which presently became their own, that they eventually settled.
The coast outside Merdö is exceptionally dangerous, but the Merdö pilots have also the reputation of being exceptionally brave and skilful. They are also perhaps the widest known. For having no defined district they take a wide range, and may to-day be lying off Lindesnaes, to-morrow under the Skaw or the Holmen, and the day after board a ship from Hamburg right away down at Horn's Reef. It is a common thing to meet one of them with his Arendal mark, his red stripe and number on the mainsail, trawling for mackerel far out over the North Sea, and even down as far as the Dogger Bank, where they get information from foreign fishing smacks of vessels from the Channel or from English or Dutch ports. If a skipper wants news from the North Sea or Skager Rack, he generally keeps a look-out for one of these pilot-boats, and finds a living shipping list, and the newest too, on board, which costs him, at the most, supposing he has nothing of interest to impart in return, a roll of tobacco, a bottle of spirits, or a strand of rope. But it is to the captain who, on some pitch-dark winter night, when the sea is running mountains high, has come in beneath bare poles under the Torungens, and who knows that he is doomed if he cannot get a pilot, that these Merdö men are most familiar. When, perhaps, he has given up all hope, he suddenly hears himself hailed from the darkness; a line is thrown; and a dripping pilot stands upon the deck. When the sea is too rough to board a vessel in any other way, they do not think twice about taking a line round their waist and jumping overboard; and when it is a point of honour with them to bring in a ship, boat and home and life weigh but very little in the opposite scale.
The black-bearded Salvé Kristiansen soon came to be the best known in Arendal of them all. The dauntless look in his keen brown eyes, his sharp features, and his short, sudden manner and way of speaking, gave the impression of a character of uncommon energy; and it was said that not the very wildest weather would deter him from going to sea. He was known to have more than once stayed alone on board a water-logged vessel while he sent his comrade on shore for help; and in his little room at home, with its white-painted windows, and geraniums, and Dutch cuckoo-clock, there stood above the roll of charts and telescope on the wall a bracket with more than one silver goblet upon it, which, like the telescope, were presents in acknowledgment of his services in piloting vessels into port under circumstances of unusual difficulty and danger. But, notwithstanding the repute in which he was held, he had never yet received the medal for saving life, nor had he yet been made a certificated pilot of the district.
He was not a man who gathered comrades round him; and as the years passed, his unapproachability of demeanour, which seemed intended to convey to people with a certain bitterness that he could do very well without them, increased. It was said up in the town that he had taken to drink. For after selling off his mackerel down on the quay, he would often now sit the whole day in Mother Andersen's parlour with his brandy-glass before him; and when evening approached, and his head had had as much as it could carry, it was just as well to keep out of his way. He did not talk much; and what attraction he found in Mother Andersen's parlour it was not easy to say. But they knew, at all events, how to treat him there; and he felt, from the casual questions that would be addressed to him after he had returned from sea, or from the way in which a newcomer would salute him, that he was in a sympathetic atmosphere, and that his name was in repute. It was even something more than respect, perhaps, which he inspired, for a sailor would think twice before sitting down beside him, unless it came natural to him to do so from the way in which they had greeted or spoken to one other.
It was not, however, any attraction which he found in Mother Andersen's parlour which made him spend so much of his time there; it was that he was afraid of his own temper at home.
When he had first set up on his own account, and had had his appointment as a duly certificated pilot for the object of his ambition, he had never made it his habit to stay in Arendal when he returned from sea instead of going home. But some two or three years after he had settled out at Merdö, a couple of incidents had occurred which made a new starting-point, as it were, in his domestic life. They were the nomination of Captain Beck, who was now a wealthy man, to the post of master of the pilots of the district, and who, as such, became his superior; and the arrival of Carl Beck to live in Arendal and superintend his father's shipbuilding yard, for which purpose he had retired from the navy. Since the arrival of the Becks he had become more and more difficult to get on with; and Elizabeth's secret, self-denying struggle grew proportionately harder. Whenever she returned from a shopping expedition to Arendal, or from seeing her aunt, she would be sure to find him in an irritable humour, which would generally vent itself in contemptuous remarks upon old Beck's incapacity for the post he held; and at last, much as she longed to get a glimpse now and then of something different from the monotony of her daily life out on Merdö, she gave up going altogether.
Her patience and self-suppression had had the effect, as years went on, of making a tyrant of her husband. When in one of his dark moods now, he would not tolerate the slightest contradiction from her or from any one in the house, and all she could do was to be quietly cheerful and affectionate, and to try her best to avoid falling into any of the traps which he would lay to catch her, and to make her, by some chance word or other, or even by a slightly displeased or resigned expression, give his bad humour an excuse for breaking out. She had to weigh every word she uttered, and to take the most roundabout methods of avoiding his sensitiveness, and after all, she would perhaps commit herself when she least expected it; upon which a scene would immediately ensue, that would be all the more unpleasant from his never expressing himself directly. Sometimes Salvé was really desperate, and would terrify her with all kinds of threats, not against her, but against himself—and she knew he was just the man to carry them out. It had often happened that for some unlucky word of hers he had gone to sea again an hour after coming home; and once in such weather that she had not the faintest hope of ever seeing him return.
She would sit at home and weep for hours together, striving to repress the angry feelings of resentment which would rise from time to time when she thought how little return she received for all she gave; how less than little her happiness was considered; and how meagre a reward for all she had to endure were the two or three days perhaps of occasional happy calm and sunshine in her home, when she seemed to have him with her as he had been in the first early days of their married life, and when he would find it as hard to tear himself away from his home again as she knew he had often found it to return. What a heart he had in reality! She alone knew that—the others judged him only by his hard and harsh exterior. And how proud she was of him when she heard the others talking of the daring things he had done, and saw how they all looked up to him! But it was not enough. And in the dulness and loneliness of her life out there on Merdö, she enjoyed to the full, during these many weary years, her woman's privilege of suffering for the man she loved. But it was not to be so always. Brighter days—little as she now expected them—were still in store for her.